Chan Lowe: Republicans and gay marriage

It’s fascinating to watch Republicans, currently in the act of collectively searching their party’s soul, working through their tortured evolution regarding same-sex marriage.

We are witnessing the slow awakening of a party that has, until now, prospered by maintaining its exclusionary attitude about gay rights and immigration (to name just two issues). Its more clear-sighted members understand that there is not going to be much of a future for a political organization that has marriage discrimination written into its party platform. Sure, it wasn’t considered “discrimination” back when they stuck it in there to placate the Christian conservatives, but events and mores have been moving at a lightning pace. Pragmatic minds know that the key to success is to sense when the political tides change, and ride them rather than buck them in order to preserve the greater good.

As the forces of the status quo realize they’re becoming isolated, they become vicious like any cornered animal, and they attack their own for their apostasy. Their condemnation of the moderates within their ranks for their doctrinal impurity will begin to sound like plaintive cries, and ultimately like pathetic bleats for attention as America — and history — trundle on without them.

If the Republicans don’t manage to find a way out of this impasse, they risk irrelevancy — and that is the number-one enemy of any political group. There is a lot more at stake in this contretemps than whether gays can get married; the whole carefully-constructed economic system for which the Republican Party stands could be upset if the nation rejects the party for its outdated cultural views, and that would be a real disaster for the powers that be.

The embrace of conservative moral values is what bolstered Republican power through recent history. Unless the party catches up with the rest of the country, that embrace may become a death-grip.